Gatorade, Born in a Florida Summer

In the summer of nineteen sixty-five, a University of Florida assistant football coach pulled a kidney specialist aside and asked him a strange question. Why was it that the Gator freshman football team, working out in the brutal August heat, never seemed to need to use the restroom after practice?

Doctor Robert Cade, a professor of medicine, looked into it. He and his colleagues, including Doctor Dana Shires, Doctor Harry Free, and Doctor Alejandro de Quesada, collected fluid samples from players. What they found was alarming. The players were losing so much sodium and potassium through sweat that their electrolyte levels had crashed. Blood sugar was dropping. Blood volume was contracting. The Florida heat was essentially shutting their bodies down from the inside.

Cade's team developed a solution: water, sodium, potassium, sugar, and phosphate. It worked biochemically. It tasted, by all accounts, terrible. Then Doctor Cade's wife suggested adding lemon juice. The taste improved enough to drink.

They tested the formula on the freshman team, who won their first game. The following year, the Gator varsity used it throughout the season, finishing nine and two and winning the Orange Bowl. Their opponent reportedly complained that the Gators had something they did not. What the Gators had was Gatorade, named for the university's mascot.

The commercial rights were eventually sold, with a settlement awarding the University of Florida a share of royalties that grew to hundreds of millions of dollars. Doctor Cade's original lab space on the University of Florida campus is marked today with a plaque. A drink mixed in a Gainesville laboratory on a hot summer afternoon became one of the most widely sold beverages in the world.